Display keeps dimming

[jojuma]

Hello,

I hope I'm right here. I experience a weird behaviour for some time now with my KDE Community Edition PinePhone:

As long as I touch the screen, the brightness goes to normal. As soon as I lift my finger, the screen dims down to minimum immediatly.
The problem does not appear, as long as the phone is charging. But if it is not connected to the charger, the Pinephone is unusable like this. Shortly everything was ok, maybe this has come from a recent update.

What could be the reason? System is up to date...

Not every time, but sometimes when trying to power the phone off, an error appears and I get a mouse pointer. But the screen is too dark to read the error message (even with flashlight). The phone stays in this state until powering it of the hard way.

I found this thread which might provide a solution. But I'd prefer not to touch system files.
Did anybody experience this and solved it?

[runhart]

I believe I am experiencing the same issue with the Beta Edition phone I received today.

I have had the Postmarket OS edition for some time now, mostly running Mobian but also some Manjaro and ubports. I have never experienced it with that phone which leads me to believe it is a hardware problem but the behaviour of the light turning off like 1 to 2 seconds after I lift my finger off the screen and coming back on instantly when I touch the screen screams software to me.

As I write this I may have come to the conclusion it is another voltage quirk in the pinephone design. Once the battery voltage was above 69/70% the problem goes away and once it is 68/69% or lower the problem comes back. This is with the device plugged in or on battery power.

[jojuma]

If this is a hardware issue as you describe, does that mean I can throw the phone into the trash bin? I can't always provide a fully charged battery, of course...

[Timothy_Ecc]

If you don't want to touch system files this will not be of any help, but I was able to fix a different issue where my screen was constantly locking by editing the same file. I would suggest editing the file using a command line program such as Nano if you want to give it a try.

Here is that forum thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13690

[jojuma]

If you don't want to touch system files this will not be of any help, but I was able to fix a different issue where my screen was constantly locking by editing the same file. I would suggest editing the file using a command line program such as Nano if you want to give it a try.

Here is that forum thread: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13690

I'm gonna take a closer look at this. In the meantime I booted another OS from a SD card and I had no issues. Therefore I exclude the possibility of an hardware issue.

Before messing around with the system files I'd rather prefer to simply reinstall the OS. But I can't find an image to download. Do you know where to find the KDE Plasma Mobile image for the Pinephone? I only find the one on this page but they say it's based on the dev-unstable branch of KDE Neon and I'd prefer a stable channel.

[acrux]

I'm gonna take a closer look at this. In the meantime I booted another OS from a SD card and I had no issues. Therefore I exclude the possibility of an hardware issue.
Before messing around with the system files I'd rather prefer to simply reinstall the OS. But I can't find an image to download. Do you know where to find the KDE Plasma Mobile image for the Pinephone? I only find the one on this page but they say it's based on the dev-unstable branch of KDE Neon and I'd prefer a stable channel.

It seems that the Settings -> Screen setup application is still not fixed - see the following thread:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13481

Plasma Mobile:
https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/plasma-mobile